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From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy by Erich H From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy by Erich H. Reck Review by: Kevin C. Klement The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Sep., 2003), pp. 177-178 Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20131965 . Accessed: 22/12/2011 16:43 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Review of Metaphysics. http://www.jstor.org SUMMARIESAND COMMENTS 177 Reck, Erich H., editor. From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xv + 470 pp. Cloth, $65.00?This anthology consists of fifteen philosophical and historical essays by different authors on the works of Frege and Wit tgenstein and the relationship between the two. (The title is not meant to imply "and everything in between.") The essays are divided into four parts: (i) historical background and general themes, (ii) Frege's philoso phy, (iii) ties between Frege's work and Wittgenstein's, and (iv) Wittgen stein's early thought. The lead essay, by the editor, gives a thorough biographical treatment of the interactions between Frege and Wittgenstein?their in-face en counters and correspondence?providing a historical backdrop for the volume. Next, Gottfried Gabriel explores what Frege's philosophy took from Hermann Lotze, and, generally, what his work shared with the neo Kantian tradition. Steven Gerrard ends part 1 by attempting to bring the "early" and "later" Wittgensteins closer together by presenting a revised reading of the dialectic of the Tractatus in line with the "New Wittgen stein" movement of Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others. Frege's conception of truth looms large in part 2. Hans Sluga outlines seven chronological phases in Frege's thinking about truth, culminating in the bold conjecture that some of the argumentation in his 1918 "The Thought" was directed at Wittgenstein. Sanford Shieh addresses whether Frege's understanding of truth precludes him from employing semantic methods in explaining and justifying his logic, contrasting his reading with those of Michael Dummett and Thomas Ricketts. Marco Ruffino investigates Frege's understanding of value-ranges as logical ob jects and argues that Frege's identification of the truth-values with value-ranges, understood as a conjecture to be tested within his system of logic, is not inconsistent with his Platonism. Joan Weiner, in turn, tackles the difficult ?32 of Grundgesetze, rejecting the standard inter pretation that it is part of an inductive, metatheoretic proof that all signs of his logical language have a reference, and reading it instead as a se ries of "elucidations" designed to aid in the recognition of the referenti ality of the primitive expressions. Warren Goldfarb begins part 3 by challenging interpretations of the Tractatus that take it to be centrally concerned with remedying certain tensions within Frege's philosophy, as he questions the sophistication of Wittgenstein's understanding of Frege. Next, Danielle MacBeth summa rizes what she sees as a fundamental divergence between Frege's infer ence-based theory of meaning and Wittgenstein's picture theory and suggests that it accounts for their smaller disagreements over judgment, identity, logical connectives, and the like. Thomas Ricketts focuses more narrowly on Wittgenstein's objections to Frege's understanding of truth-functional connectives and the judgment stroke, tracing them to the understanding of the sense of a sentence Wittgenstein developed in response to difficulties in Russell's theory of representation. Cora Dia mond closes part 3 by placing Wittgenstein's discussion of truth and rep resentation within a distinctly pre-Tarskian framework established in part by Frege and Russell and challenges the interpretation of the Trac tatus as presenting a sophisticated correspondence theory. 178 ELIZABETH C. SHAW AND STAFF In part 4, Ian Proops explores Wittgenstein's account of logical entail ment as an internal relation between the structures of propositions as well as his criticisms of Frege and Russell on this topic. Juliet Floyd takes on Wittgenstein's early understanding of numbers and arithmetic, focusing on his understanding of operations and variables and alleging that it has a rarely appreciated centrality and importance. In his contri bution, Matthew Ostrow connects Wittgenstein's claim that his work is an attempt to find a "liberating word" to help one attain release from philosophical puzzlement with certain dialectical moves present throughout the Tractatus. The volume culminates in James Conant's lengthy and long-awaited piece, "The Method of the Tractatus," which portrays Wittgenstein's method as derived from his understanding of philosophy as consisting both of elucidations (Erl?uterungen) and of nonsense (Unsinn), placing it against the backdrop of similar struggles for Frege. Given its depth and comprehensiveness, this last essay is es pecially sure to be received as an essential read in the Wittgenstein liter ature. Although they differ in quality and originality, together, these essays comprise an important contribution to the exploration of early analytic philosophy as a branch of the history of philosophy. It is a relatively re cent phenomenon that the appropriate distance has been achieved to at tempt to understand these thinkers on their own terms. The historical approach of this volume is admirable. This is not to say, however, that the thoughts presented here on truth, nonsense, and the like would have no insights to offer contemporary philosophers. There is some redun dancy both among the essays in the volume and between them and pre vious works by the same authors; those on Wittgenstein are a tad slanted toward "The New Wittgenstein" interpretation, and, somewhat naturally, the volume puts disproportional stress on Frege as an influ ence on Wittgenstein vis-?-vis Russell and others, but these are small faults compared to its strong points.?Kevin C. Klement, University of Massachusetts. Rescher, Nicholas. Minding Matter: And Other Essays in Philosophical In quiry. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001. xii + 146 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $21.95?All but three of the nine essays in this col lection are reprinted from elsewhere, with varying degrees of modifica tion. This volume is the thirteenth in the author's series of similar col lections dating back to 1969. The three new essays are entitled, "The Rise and Fall of Analytic Philosophy," "Perspectives on Nature in Ameri can Thought," and "Nomic Hierarchies and Problems of Relativism." There is no one theme or set of themes that holds this collection to gether as a unit. As a result, each essay is a more or less freestanding discussion. Other main topics from the earlier essays are the author's notion of conceptual idealism (that is, that the notion of what is real un avoidably always contains mind-invoking terms); the state of philosophy during and at the end of the twentieth century; the question of whether reasoning about values is circular; the burdens of human choice; and the .
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